Being that this is indeed Sunday, I thought it time for the resurrection of Sunday Lou, especially seeing as how original articles on my site have been few and far between the past two months. The tone of Lou’s song, Hang on to Your Emotions, from his 1996 album Set the Twilight Reeling (one of my personal favorites in his extensive catalog) is very fitting for my various frustrations and insecurities as of late. Of course, it is not my intent to turn this site into my personal forum for the occasional introspective and esoteric examination of my life, though there ultimately will be a bit of that, but by and large, constructive and pragmatic critique of our Imperialist State is what sparks my intellectual passions. Part of my frustration stems from so many recent assaults on our freedom and our common sense by the forces of said Imperialism. So for today, Sunday Lou will be a manifestation of my quips regarding recent political deeds and doings. continue reading…

Dancing in the Devil’s Playground

I just returned from Washington D.C. where, for the first time in this writer’s life, I experienced and participated in Democracy — Real American Corporate Democracy (amen to that brothers and sisters).

This is not to say that I have not voted, for indeed I have. In fact, I have voted in practically every election I have been eligible to vote in since I turned 18 in 1994. This is not to say that I have not written to my representatives and been a part of organizations that petition our government for reform, for indeed I have. I have taken the steps of a concerned and dedicated citizen given the options afforded to me to participate in the democratic process of the United States of America.

Where has this gotten me exactly? Quite honestly, it has not gotten me far as I do not have the voice and the high-priced lobbyists of the multi-national, multi-billion dollar corporations who have the ability to meet directly with the members of the House of Representatives and the members of the Senate to petition them for enacting or blocking legislation for the benefit of said Corporations. continue reading…

What is Lady Liberty to do? Stuck in the middle of two parties that represent the same corporate interests while giving her platitudes about our rights and our liberties. No wonder she is covering her face.

When Alexis de Tocqueville publishedDemocracy in Americain 1835, little did he know how the quintessential concept of American Democracy — with all of the good and all of the bad — would shape the course of global events for the next 175 years. But de Tocqueville did however, predict that Democracy can quite easily turn into despotism under the guise of liberty and freedom.

Alexis de Tocqueville had quite a quaint and romantic notion — though wholly realistic — of the potential of the Democracy he saw in America for the greater good of the human condition, though he framed it within the greater context of historical notions of freedom and liberty, determining that American Democracy does not have a patent on freedom, but rather was one of many systems of rule where freedom prospered.

Freedom has appeared in the world at different times and under various forms; it has not been exclusively bound to any social condition, and it is not confined to democracies. Freedom cannot, therefore, form the distinguishing characteristic of democratic ages. The peculiar and preponderant fact that marks those ages as its own is the equality of condition; the ruling passion of men in those periods is the love of this equality. Do not ask what singular charm the men of democratic ages find in being equal, or what special reasons they may have for clinging so tenaciously to equality rather than to the other advantages that society holds out to them: equality is the distinguishing characteristic of the age they live in; that of itself is enough to explain that they prefer it to all the rest…

Democratic nations are at all times fond of equality, but there are certain epochs at which the passion they entertain for it swells to the height of fury. This occurs at the moment when the old social system, long menaced, is overthrown after a severe internal struggle, and the barriers of rank are at length thrown down. At such times men pounce upon equality as their booty, and they cling to it as to some precious treasure which they fear to lose.[1]continue reading…

With the BP oil spill still raging after a month of disinformation and stonewalling from both BP and the Obama Administration as well as the catastrophe of the Massey coal mine explosion just two weeks prior to the BP Gulf disaster, the left and right are playing their trite and expected “blame game” without acknowledging the actual systemic realities of a Government that enables BP and Massey to rape and plunder the earth for the sake of profit at the expense of the environment and human life.

Rather than exacerbating the reactionary mindset of the “left” and the “right,” I prefer to look at the history of political economy as a whole, and show that the recent environmental and economic disasters of BP and Massey are the result of a system that promotes unsustainable energy simply for the sake of propagating energy profiteers that have had their teeth in our political system for well over 150 years. The environmental and human collateral has been tremendous and is not about the incompetence or passivity of either the Democrats or the Republicans as they both propagate this system. continue reading…

To say there is no more left and no more right might be a bit of an over simplification of a complex dynamic of political economy, but nonetheless is an accurate one given the utter and total takeover of government by moneyed, corporate interests. This modern corporatism has created a democratic system that serves only to divide and conquer. Rather than taking constructive and historically realistic views of the state of the two party system, the two camps, Liberal and Conservative (Democrat & Republican), are engaged in a constant reactionary state, disregarding material reality in order to claim the rightness of their actions. When W. Bush was blindly supported and cheered by the “right” for the dismantling of democracy for corporate interests, the so-called “left” spent a great deal of energy reacting to Bush’s actions and using charged hyperbole that did little, if anything to change perceptions of his administration’s actions. Likewise, as those on “the left,” or the Liberals, blindly cheer Obama as he dismantles our democracy for corporate interests, the “right” uses their energy to react by claiming “socialism”among other loaded terms that perpetuate the same divisiveness.

In Neil Postman’s book Amusing Ourselves to Death (1985), the concept of big brother is described through an analysis of Aldous Huxley’s 1932 classic Brave New World rather than the cliched totalitarianism of Orwell’s 1984. There is one particular passage that is quite profound in regard to the current climate of political, cultural and social discourse — or the lack thereof — that pervades every aspect of our current ability to disregard history for the immediate reactionary propagation of disinformation intended to keep us divided. When the term Big Brother is used and thrown around, its meaning is relegated to a very simplified notion of Government and/or corporate control of our lives. In this particular case, Big Brother is the Government and Corporate interests all in one package: a symbiotic assimilation of capitalist/corporate interests that control our democracy through our elected officials. continue reading…